Hey all, I was talking with Peter and discovered that comments are considered a feature that might go away. I hope it stays as I think it is an essential feature. Please hear why - it allows a kind of collaboration and discussion on a larger scale - and in a different modality than when editing a document as well as giving those who may not feel confident to change a document to post questions or add an angle on a subject and allows for a more "conversation level" communication about the topic at hand. Oddly, I didn't realize Web Platform had this feature at first because the icon vanishes on my browser, BUT I was going to suggest it to Peter, which started the whole conversation and his suggestion that I put my thoughts into the bug tracker. 

Why, you may ask, was I going to suggest this feature. I've recently had an experiences while learning Mercurial, a terminal-based versioning program, which has a free book online which was also published by Orielly. The free online version has an additional feature, comments on each paragraph. I got more out of the comments than I did from the actual book. It was wonderful to have people debate points, disagree with the author and point to links that explained things. People could also post how they didn't understand something and then someone else would come along and answer the question. This, in particular was extremely helpful because, oftentimes I would have the same question. And it was answered there in the comments. Perhaps this could inspire someone who knows their stuff to edit the doc itself, but how would they know without the comments?


So, here is a link to the aforementioned example of this working really well: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/mercurial-in-daily-use.html

And if you don't use Mercurial, I highly suggest it - its much faster than Git and Subversion...though you can find debates on the finer points of why some users like one versioning program over another in the comments of this book! 

Seriously, on-page-contextual-commenting allows one to have a sense of community and conversation as well for a more direct (q&a) communication when you need/want it, since one can ignore the comments if you want.

Thanks for considering keeping this feature and please feel free to contact me if there is anything I can do to help support or develop this feature.

(UX/UI note: I think that the comments should be nearly invisible, but there for those who want it, when they want it)